5 Ways To Build Trust with a Team of Freelancers

One of the biggest struggles solo entrepreneurs have with hiring & delegating is establishing the big T word – TRUST.

Much of the risk or fear involved with letting people into your business comes down to this biggie. 

Who can I trust with my business? 
How to build trust with someone you just met? 
How do I know if the person is trustworthy?

Hiring and working with Freelancers shouldn’t feel that different than hiring employees, but often times it does. With employees, business owners feel a sense of control (even if it’s just perception), whereas freelancers are typically hired on a short-term contractor or as-needed basis, they have more freedom and control of when and where, and can often be more difficult to build trust with. 


I believe one opportunity to bridge this “trust gap” is to start treating Freelancers more like you would treat a long-term employee and in doing so your working relationship will be much richer and effective than it otherwise would be. 


Here are 5 ways to build (& foster) trust with freelancers (or a team of freelancers): 

  • Give Trust First
  • Align Your Values
  • Over Communicate
  • Be Consistent
  • Foster Accountability

1. Give Trust First

This can be sort of a catch 22 type thing, how is trust established? By hiring trustworthy people first or trusting people before knowing they’re worthy of your trust? Giving trust first requires vulnerability and one of the keys I’ve realized to unlocking vulnerability is the remembrance that no one can hurt me.

 

The truth is – someone can come into your business and cheat, lie or steal. This can and does happen, although it’s probably much more rare than anticipated, we all have heard the horror stories of the CFO that ran away with $5M and moved to Aruba. There are things that you do in business that are just smart – like having a contract in place, Non-Disclosure Agreements, doing background checks, etc. buuuut once you’ve mitigated those biggies and smart about the obvious risks – you have to extend trust first.

 

The first person to trust in business – yourself. 

 
Yup, that’s one of the weakest links – is the trust a leader has in themselves. When you trust yourself, you’ll catch a lot of red flags early on, you’ll hire slow, and fire fast.
 
 
 
Once you got this down, trusting others becomes much easier. Trust will come down to action and actually showing your team that you trust them but you can also encourage this by avoiding micromanaging and saying things like “I trust you to handle _____”, or asking “what do you think a solution to _____ would be?”

2. Aligning Your Values

This one’s usually a gimme but so many times business owners still don’t clearly communicate (& most importantly – LIVE) their values and vision of their company. This is important in communicating (mostly through action) what your business stands for and your WHY behind it. 

 

How can you know someone doesn’t align with your values if you never communicate them?

3. Over Communicate & Transparency

More about this big “C” word – communication is key – actually it’s key to every relationship so why would it be any different with freelancers or employees that you hire? I know it can be exhausting, but no one can read your mind, so when in doubt – communicate it out

4. Be Consistent

One of the biggest complains from entrepreneurs who have bad experiences hiring is that the person wasn’t consistent with showing up, doing the work, being on time, reliable, etc. 

 

The best way to increase consistency with teams is to lead by example. Shit happens and stuff will throw you off from being consistent, I know, I’ve been there plenty of times. Try your darnedest to set structure and stick to it. 

 

For example, weekly meetings at a set date/time every week; not rescheduling an hour before. Show up to all meetings on time, if you’re late, you’re setting the tone that it’s OK to be late. If you prefer everyone communication on one channel (i.e. Slack), which I highly recommend, then resist the urge to contact your team via text or email. What’s not OK for them, should never be OK for you either. The rules should apply to everyone. 

5. Foster accountability

Step 1 to fostering accountability – having clear structure. Can you really hold someone accountable to their results if there aren’t clear goals, ways to measure or clear structure on what done looks like? You may not have the clearest plan, goals and perfect KPI’s (key performance indicators) just yet, and that’s OK. 

You don’t need a perfect plan and KPI’s to start growing your team – but you do need to have clear structure, roles, and communicate expectations for the projects you’re working on. Your team needs to know what done looks like (i.e. what your expectation is), having a structured way to track & communicate progress (like ClickUp or Trello) then and only then you can hold them accountable.

 
 
Holding your team accountable, of course starts with holding yourself accountable. Don’t make promises to your team that you can’t keep. I’ve personally struggled with this one as I can at times be unrealistic with my own timelines. I had to call myself out and stop making deadlines and promises I couldn’t keep. 

Holding your team accountable usually looks like asking the tough questions and having the uncomfortable conversations like “what kept you from meeting X goal?”, “what caused the delay in _____?”, “going forward, how can I (we) support you so that X gets done on time?” 
 

 

 

Final Thoughts...

Building trust from one working relationship to another, regardless if it’s a full-time employee or a 6-month contract with a freelancer, the core principles outlined here are the same. Embodying these methods for building trust makes you a better leader and someone that others love to work with. 

 

What do you think? How do you build trust when hiring help for your business?